Kaleidoscope Cats
English artist Louis Wain (1860-1939) became well-known for his unique paintings all revolving around the humanization of cats. Wain was said to of suffered from paranoid delusions and Asperger’s syndrome. During his incarceration at Napsbury hospital in London he created his most prevalent work. His paintings depict the worsening of his Schizophrenia as the cats become more abstract over the years he spends in the psychiatric hospital.
Image Credits
Feature:Louis Wain at Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
It’s sad, to look at this sequence of paintings and imagine the changing state of mind of the artist.
I read somewhere there has been debate about this…with it pointed out that Wain produced radically different works dated to about the same time….realistic and abstract images more or less created concurrently…and that it was one of his psychiatrists who put the sequence together to create the impression of sequential dissolution. He was an artist…artists play around with images, they experiment, and an interest/fascination with wallpaper and textile designs etc. could be a simple motivator. He certainly suffered from mental/ emotional illness, as his need of lifelong care confirms, but I don’t think an artist’s eccentric output is necessarily a reliable indicator of his/her illness without chapter-and-verse documentation. Perhaps he was sick of the endless anthro-cats the public wanted from him, and devolved them into fractal fests as a kind of humorous revenge. At any rate, I find all his images entertaining and delightful.